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The Goldsmith’s Apprentice is Keith Chandler’s first collection since moving to the West Midlands, an area which, with its industrial and craft heritage, has influenced many of the new poems.
As Will Daunt has written in Envoi: In his craft, Chandler has been patient rather than prolific and is the better writer for it. He has been uncompromising in the development of a style that is literate as it is accessible. He deserves an ever-expanding readership.
‘The Goldsmith’s Apprentice opens with a wonderful sequence of poems about work. From glassworkers to glass eye fitters, these poems understand the routines and insanities of what people do to earn a crust, revealing with great empathy the impact of industry on lives. This wide-ranging collection moves outwards from there to a broad scope of subjects, from ties to lost campervans, from an old man at the gym to a moving final sequence about a grandchild. Now humorous, now powerful, crammed with good ideas and great endings, these are accessible poems which are deeply engaged with both the ephemera and the big issues of ordinary lives. More than anything, I value them for their great humanity, their understanding of the power of poetry to celebrate the importance of lives lost to history, tough work or a duff education system. To appropriate the ending of a wonderfully moving poem about a nurse, these poems, coming as they do out of the best motivations and the deepest artistic rigour, are The Real Thing: Jonathan Edwards, Winner of The Costa Award for Poetry
'This is a fresh, nuanced and humane collection of poems with its eye and ear to the world - to the world of work in particular, and to the craft of survival. It is a wonderful and generous book. The poems welcome you in and hold your attention with their deftness, attentiveness and joy-in-making.’ David Morley, Winner of The Ted Hughes Award
